Once More, Into the Light

Once More, Into the Light

Shifting between first-person contemplations, epistolary poems, and narrative voice, Diaz renders some tenderness from life’s traumas and losses which gnarl like banyan roots in a landscape/life ardently trying to recover, find sustenance, and thrive. Once More, Into the Light metaphorizes this tangled aspect via its webbed scaffolding and slipping perspectives ranging from quiet, self-comforting, prayer-like estuaries of light to the wounded Chiron offering support and comfort to “you” the reader, or any disoriented soul who winds up on their doorstep. This movement is a cyclical becoming as James knows to achieve wholeness, one must scrutinize each fragment, the lost little girls and boys of self, the sectioned teenagers, and the fragility of others that may comprise and/or foil our worlds. The book’s power is, in fact, built on its exploration of meditative interiority and the vision gained through seeing “the world from the back of a bus” while acknowledging how “the orange rind of some days gathers down the sway…” It drives home the notion that we are, however lonely, not alone in our experiences as beings navigating our blows and that finding wholeness/light isn’t a linear journey and address we arrive at but a continual process we must repeatedly do “once more.” - Koss, Dancing Backwards Towards Pluperfect Once More, Into the Light exemplifies the extraordinary lens time can provide: a re-sighting. The collection is a meditation on the long arm of childhood’s often profound hurts, and takes us on a kind of journey through a peacemaking process with the past, instructing us to “Learn to love the world regardless of what it does to you” (“If I'm not back by noon, you can have my room”). Diaz’s poems reject cynicism and teach us that the darkness of trauma—familial, institutional, the everydayness of everyday pain—is not insurmountable, and that we are capable of pushing toward light. This collection is an urgent, timely, reminder that joy is “imperfectly everywhere.” – H.E. Fisher, Sterile Field James Diaz’s Once More, Into the Light is a heartachingly beautiful collection that dares us to do the unthinkable: surrender to past trauma, reckon with it, and survive: “Don’t bet your own goodness / Against what happened to you.” Through evocative imagery, Diaz reminds us that it will not be easy, and we will have moments of self-doubt as the darkness pulls at our sleeve, until “God’s anger is a house in me.” Yet if we open our eyes, it can also transform us into the “smallest church” as “the most important things are only ever revealed to us in the dark.” An underlying thread connecting these poems suggests suffering can strengthen us and make us wiser: “You look right into the world / And you thank it for breaking you down / Into what you are now.” It becomes a strange gift we give ourselves and others that changes the course of intergenerational shame to create something only we can, as we begin to look at the world with wonder—when all indications would have suggested otherwise: “and can’t you just see us / almost smiling / at something / something we are / here now in this place / we built to hold us.” These poems sing of resilience and hope without burying the past; instead, they embrace it as part of life’s mysterious equation, making healing possible." – Lisa Cerbone, We Still Have Sky